Introduction:
This storey is a memoir of part of my life which was close to Bapak Muhammad Subuh during the twenty eight years from 1959 to his death in 1987. I describe the man in action, in my life and in his mission, which was to pass onto others the spiritual exercise of Subud, the latihan.
It is a selection of personal experiences. It is not a biography of Bapak and does not attempt to describe in detail the Subud movement. It is in the main my account of what happened after I made contact with the possibility of following the Will of God within myself.
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When I heard, that the latihan - a direct receiving from the power of God - was available in this world, I was at once convinced of its reality and yet unable to believe my good fortune. After thirty five years of following the latihan, these feelings have not changed. That the power of God can be received so simply and directly is still a marvel.
I felt sure that I would never be lucky enough to meet Bapak, the man chosen to bring this contact to mankind. It was to be quite otherwise and without my design. I later went to live in Indonesia, at Bapak's invitation, and after several years spent close to him and Ibu, his wife, I travelled around the world with him visiting many countries and translating his talks into Spanish, my native language.
Bapak's personal attention encouraged and supported me through the process of change which I was to face after coming into Subud. And he treated me with exceeding kindness even when I went through a severe test of faith.
This book started out, through the encouragement of my friends, as a record of my experiences with Bapak, but as I wrote I realised I wanted to do it as a token of my gratitude. If it brings the latihan to the attention of others, it will come nearest to Bapak's greatest wish and to what may be the Will of God for mankind.
An extract:
A new purpose and direction in living began for me when I received the latihan of Subud. I now had an inner life that gave its own tone to what I was doing. I wanted to stay close to it. Once I had received the contact in September 1958, all that was required of me was the personal act of sincere surrender to God and the latihan.
No longer was I able to go along in a completely automatic way, For the first time I knew what it was to act from a source inside myself, as well as my outer self. I had started to become the observer and the observed.
Sometimes I suddenly had a new insight. It was given and then I had to grow into it. The process felt totally natural, as did everything about the latihan. It was an instinctive harmonising force. For example, my perceptions of right behaviour started to come under question. Nowhere was this more apparent than with my family. As wife and mother, I began to see where I could be more flexible and patient.
The effect became evident in areas of myself that I had no idea needed to be changed. As a person I was awakened to my own individuality and started to have a new confidence in my own judgements. This was a significant break from the rigidity of my up bringing.
At times the changes happening in other people due to the latihan seemed more obvious to me than my own. They became relaxed, were less intense about their opinions, more accepting, and often obviously more happy. This did not depend on strong latihan experiences. One who had obviously changed significantly in these ways complained that she didn't feel very much in her latihan.
I continued to attend the latihan diligently twice a week and made new friends. After latihan we would often go out for a meal or on Sunday to the home of someone for tea. There was a new kind of closeness. We talked about this as closeness of our feeling, but in fact we didn't know exactly what it was. What was clear was that opening ourselves to God in the latihan had the result of connecting us with each other at a deeper level.
Meantime my mother had a strange experience. My brother was in England and I was in New York, while Mayko [my mother] was in Chile. As soon as my brother and I started to do the latihan in 1958, Mayko became mysteriously ill. She knew nothing of what we were doing. This could be put down to coincidence, if it were not for the nature of the illness. Her strange illness was that she became week and would lose her balance. She could not keep her head up straight. She decided to go to her birth place, Punta Arenas, to visit her mother and family. Nothing changed, her condition slowly worsened. She returned to Santiago and visited her family doctor, who put her in hospital for a complete checkup. When it was done, he said, "Mrs. Petric, there is absolutely nothing wrong with you!" This was typical of a Subud illness connected with the spiritual purification. I came to believe that this was as a result of her son and daughter's starting the latihan.
There was some outer evidence. My mother had been a heavy smoker for many years. It had happened accidentally when my father brought home a packet of American cigarettes from the US company where he worked in northern Chile. Mayko tried one and she was hooked. She wanted to stop but couldn't. Silently she made a promise that, if she ever had the chance to stop, she would. During this strange illness, she could not smoke and she never touched a cigarette again. When she wrote to me about this, I realised that it happened immediately after my brother and I had started the latihan, and that it was the beginning of a process of purification in her.
When my brother returned to Chile, he helped to arrange the visit of Bapak and Ibu to Santiago to open the first group in April 1959. Mayko was there but didn't know what was going on. She asked my brother, "What is happening?" He in his masculine way, answered, "This is good for you, just go into the room there!" She went in and the opening began. She responded immediately and from that moment, her latihan was always very strong.
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For more information on the book:
The Man from the East - Istimah Week
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